Blackmailed by the Bomb: Nuclear Anxiety and the Cult of the
Superweapon

In May
of 2009, respected American journalist Seymour Hersh shared a
shocking revelation during an Arab TV interview. According to
Hersh, Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, was a
victim of a “special death squad formed by former U.S.
vice-president Dick Cheney” (“U.S. special squad killed
Benazir”). This squad was “headed by General Stanley
McChrystal, the newly-appointed commander of U.S. army in
Afghanistan” with Cheney using his position as chief of the
Joint Special Operation Command to “clear the way for the
U.S. by exterminating opponents through the unit and the CIA”
(ibid).

Hersh has speculated that Bhutto was assassinated because she
shared her opinion that Osama Bin Laden had been assassinated by
Omar Saeed Sheikh (ibid). Could there be, however, a deeper reason
for the Bhutto hit? These writers suggested as much during
interviews on several radio shows shortly after the December 27,
2007 assassination. At that time, many in the media were blaming al
Qaeda for the hit. The chief source for this claim seems to have
been an “obscure Italian Web site” that alleged that
its reporter had received a telephone call from Mustafa Abu
al-Yazid, al Qaeda's commander in Afghanistan (Ross). During the
call, al-Yazid supposedly stated: “We terminated the most
precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the]
mujahedeen” (ibid). The Web site further contended that Ayman
al Zawahri, al Qaeda's number two leader, decided it was time to do
away with Bhutto back in October 2007 (ibid). While all of this
sounded like a smoking gun, the claim was anything but conclusive.
According to ABC's Brian Ross, U.S. intelligence officials said
they could not confirm the claim of responsibility for the attack
(ibid).

While al Qaeda may very well have been involved in the
assassination, it should be understood that al Qaeda is merely part
of a larger conspiratorial infrastructure, so it may not be
accurate to place the blame solely at the doorstep of a single
terrorist organization. Bhutto had vowed to do many things that
would invite violent reprisal if she was re-elected prime minister.
One promise that probably set off several alarm bells among the
world's wealthy and powerful appeared in a September 26, 2007
report in the Times of India. According to the report,
Bhutto promised to allow inspectors from the United Nation's
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to question A.Q. Khan,
the metallurgist nuclear black marketer and father of Pakistan's
“Islamic Bomb” (“Bhutto commits to letting IAEA
question A.Q. Khan”).

During a visit to Washington before returning to Pakistan from
her self-imposed exile, the former prime minister stated before the
Middle East Institute: “While we do not agree at this stage
to have any Western access to A.Q. Khan, we do believe that IAEA...
would have the right to question A.Q. Khan” (ibid). Bhutto
almost certainly understood that Khan's revelations to the
inspectors would implicitly suggest that wealthy and powerful
individuals who comprise the global oligarchical establishment were
involved in the creation and shepherding of the Khan nuclear
proliferation network. While she did not overtly say as much,
Bhutto subtly suggested that Khan was anything but a rogue when she
stated: “Many Pakistanis are cynical about whether A.Q. Khan
could have done this without any official sanction” (ibid).
The former prime minister was signing her own death warrant by
ripping the veil off of one of the oligarchs' deepest, darkest, and
closely-guarded secrets: the power elite and dark factions within
the intelligence community had assisted Khan in making the world a
more dangerous place.

The Khan network was created by an alliance between the American
elite and the Saudi elites known as the Safari Club. Thanks to this
alliance, Saudi Arabia supplanted Israel as the CIA's chief source
of regional intelligence (Trento 99). For quite some time,
counterintelligence chief James Angleton had maintained a
“special relationship with Israel,” an association that
the CIA resented (99). However, Angleton’s dismissal in 1974
precipitated the decline of the pro-Israel elements within the
Agency (99). With these elements significantly weakened, the CIA
was free to forge ties with the Saudi royals in 1976. At the time,
the Agency had been struggling with a substantial lack of political
capital. In 1973, America's ground involvement in Vietnam met with
an ignominious end. This humiliating anti-climax was compounded by
the fall of Saigon two years later. In addition, 1974 witnessed the
startling revelations of the Watergate scandal, which generated
considerable public outrage. By 1976, America’s patience with
the CIA had been exhausted. The infamous "Year of Intelligence" had
begun.

Voluminous instances of unlawful activity within the
intelligence community eventually came under the indignant scrutiny
of the Church and Pike Committees. Congress defunded all
intelligence operations abroad, necessitating the Agency’s
solicitation of the Saudis for badly needed funds. The Saudi royal
family cemented their control over America’s intelligence
financing with the formation of the Safari Club (102). The
all-purpose banner of anti-communism supplied an expedient
rationale for this questionable partnership.

Prince Turki synopsized the purposes and objectives of the
Safari Club in a 2002 speech to the Georgetown University
alumni:

"And now I will go back to the secret that I promised to tell
you. In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your
intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could
not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write
reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for
that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting
Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The
Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and
Iran. The principal aim of this club was that we would share
information with each other in countering Soviet influence
worldwide, and especially in Africa. In the 1970s, there were still
some countries in Africa that were coming out of colonialism, among
them Mozambique, Angola, and I think Djibouti. The main concern of
everybody was that the spread of Communism was taking place while
the main country that would oppose Communism was tied up. Congress
had literally paralyzed the work not only of the U.S. intelligence
community but of its foreign service as well. And so the Kingdom,
with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the
world safe at the time when the United States was not able to do
that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don't know. I am
not saying it because I look to tell secrets, but because the time
has gone and many of the actors are gone as well." (Qutd. in Trento
102)

Exploiting the threat of communism was commonplace within the
dialectical climate of the Cold War. Conflict invariably gives rise
to security discourses. In turn, security discourses are dominated
by fear. When the politics of fear become the order of the day,
concepts such as civil liberty and the rule of law are
automatically subordinated to security concerns. Such circumstances
tend to engender contempt toward democratic processes and,
eventually, contrarians are portrayed as enemies of the State. More
and more power becomes concentrated within the State, an entity
that is already susceptible to the harmful influences of
indifferent political and technical elites. Naturally, such a state
of affairs would prove advantageous to America’s ruling
class, who continually promoted their own variety of socialism as
an alternative to communism. Thus, the Western elite had a vested
interest in maintaining the dialectical climate of the Cold War.
The Safari Club, which embodied the coalition between American
oligarchs and the Saudi royal family, was instrumental in realizing
this goal.

In 1978, Islamic fighters, which were supported by the Safari
Club, initiated a campaign of agitation that would ultimately
incite the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (167). The Safari
Club’s Islamic fighters began conducting a series of
cross-border raids into Soviet territory (167). Eventually, the
Soviet Union was ensnared in the Afghan War. The quagmire that
followed allowed the power elite to realize two major objectives
that would yield significant long-term dividends.

The first of these was the creation of enemies for future
Hegelian activism. In the name of fighting communism, the Islamic
people could be radicalized with a violent form of their religion.
The blowback that stemmed from this radicalization campaign would
provide the power elite with a socially and political expedient
adversary in the forthcoming “War on Terror,” which
really amounted to little more than a dialectical ruse. This
conflict would facilitate militaristic campaigns abroad and the
dismantling of civil liberties domestically under the Patriot
Act.

The second objective realized by the Afghan War was the
maintenance of the ongoing dialectical rivalry between East and
West. America had already experienced Vietnam. Now, in the true
spirit of Hegelian reciprocity, the Soviets had to be given a
Vietnam of their own. This trap had been laid by Zbigniew
Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy
Carter. Brzezinski admitted as much in an interview with the French
magazine Le Nouvel Observateur:

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his
memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services
began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the
Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security
adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this
affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history,
CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after
the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality,
secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was
July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for
secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And
that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained
to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet
military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert
action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war
and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to
intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they
would. (“Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski”)

Brzezinski’s plan for instigating the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan was presented to Carter in a 1979 memo (Trento 318).
Brzezinski stated in the memo that, should America embark on such a
course of action, efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation in
Pakistan would have to be abandoned (318). After all, Pakistan's
cooperation in the anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan was absolutely
imperative. In essence, the National Security Advisor was asserting
that the United States government should blatantly overlook the
emergent Islamic bomb in favor of settling an old score in the Cold
War dialectic.

It is fairly obvious that Carter was merely a puppet of
Brzezinski. Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s campaign advisor, had
issued a loud admonition about Brzezinski, stating: "If, after the
inauguration [of Jimmy Carter] you find… Zbigniew Brzezinski
as head of National Security, then I would say we failed and I'd
quit" (Epperson 232). Although Jordan did not resign, he had
correctly identified Brzezinski as a representative of oligarchical
interests (232). Brzezinski employed the services of David
Rockefeller, the consummate American elitist, in the formation of
the Trilateral Commission (235). At the time, Rockefeller was
chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), America’s
veritable foreign policy cartel (232). In fact, Ralph Epperson
reveals that "all eight American representatives to the founding
meeting of the Commission were members of the CFR" (232).

Moreover, Brzezinski had dubious connections to the intelligence
community. While he was working in the CIA’s East Europe
Division, Ted Shackley had recruited Brzezinski into the Agency
(Trento 166). One of Shackley’s close friends was Edwin
Wilson, who was instrumental in the creation of "a private
intelligence network beyond the reach of official accountability"
(58, 52). Congressman Charlie Wilson, an associate of Edwin Wilson,
worked in tandem with the CIA to consistently block Congressional
efforts to discontinue the flow of American funds to Pakistan
(316). In fact, Charles Wilson egregiously remarked to Pakistan's
President Zia: "Mr. President, as far as I'm concerned you can make
all the bombs you want" (316). A substantial portion of this money
found its way to the A.Q. Khan syndicate (313).

At first, the notion of a nuclear Pakistan was thoroughly
undesirable to the American elite. Dr. John Coleman, who some
believe to be a former British intelligence operative, has claimed
that Kissinger threatened Pakistani President Ali Bhutto when he
expressed the ambition to transform his nation into a nuclear power
(28). However, General Zia ul Haq, who Coleman characterizes as "a
Council on Foreign Relations representative," had Bhutto executed
in 1979 (28). Bhutto's death notwithstanding, Pakistan's efforts to
create an "Islamic bomb" continued unabated under President Zia,
thereby prompting Carter to halt all economic and military aid to
the country (315).

This state of affairs would be radically altered by the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. Once more, the cause of anti-communism
would be invoked by disingenuous parties to facilitate a dubious
agenda. In the name of warding off the Soviet hordes, the Carter
Administration brokered a deal with Zia to use Pakistan as a base
of operations for the mujahideen (315-16). Yet again, money was
channeled into Pakistan. A considerable amount of it would finance
Khan's efforts to build a nuclear bomb. The Safari Club and Saudi
royals played a central role in this sordid affair:

The same leadership that promulgated the Safari Club-the Saudi
royals-also strongly funded and supported the Islamic Development
Bank. Begun in 1973, the IDB now has 55 member states, with Saudi
Arabia dominating, with 27.33 percent of the bank's funding. As a
comparison, Egypt contributes 9.48% and Pakistan just 3.41% of the
bank's total capital. It was through the bank's scientific and
economic development efforts that huge amounts were funneled into
Pakistan, which ended up in the hands of A.Q. Khan and his
now-infamous nuclear bomb-building syndicate. (Trento 313)

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan allowed the Safari Club to
negotiate a deal with Pakistan that, in turn, would facilitate the
emergence of the “Islamic Bomb.” Trento outlines the
specifics of this Faustian deal:

Pakistani intelligence would handle all the money going to
facilitate the proxy war against the Soviets. That meant hundreds
of millions of dollars from the United States and Saudi Arabia were
being run through Pakistan with no accountability. "Unfortunately,"
said [CIA liaison to the corporate world] Robert Crowley, "the
Pakistanis knew exactly where their cut of the money was to go."
Where the money went was into an Islamic nuclear-weapons program
supported by Saudi Arabia and accepted by the United States.
(314)

British Customs took notice of this Islamic nuclear weapons
program during the 1990s and, working with an Arabic-speaking
Muslim agent, began examining Khan’s bomb-making syndicate
(314). Ominously enough, the investigation eventually discovered
that the United States "had no interest in shutting down the
network, which had been operating for years" (314). Worse still,
the British weren’t the only ones to unearth such unsettling
revelations. The French arrived at the very same conclusion:

A top French Intelligence official, who asked that his name be
withheld from publication, described the U.S. - Pakistani cover-up
of the Khan network as having "an important precedent. Just as the
U.S. allowed Israel to develop nuclear weapons, under pressure from
the Saudis, the U.S. allowed Pakistan to be Saudi Arabia's proxy as
the first Islamic nuclear state. The Saudis put up the cash and
have clean hands as Pakistan builds the bomb for its supposed
defense against India over Kashmir . . . but my country and the
British received no cooperation starting in the 1980's when we
discovered traces of Khan's network. The U.S. did not want to
discuss it." (314-15)

Yet, the United States was not merely overlooking the Khan
network, but was actively supporting it:

A senior source in the British government, who asks not to be
named, confirms that Khan ran the network and that parts for the
nuclear-weapons program came from the United States. Khan's
daughter, attending school in England, was being tutored, and at
the ends of faxes dealing with logistics for her education, Khan
would sometimes write, in his own hand, items he needed for the
nuclear program. (315)

Under the aegis of a transnational coalition between the Saudi
elite and the American elite, the Khan network would become a major
supplier of weapons equipment to Iran, Libya, Malaysia, and North
Korea. In summation, the nuclear proliferation witnessed during the
late 20th century and the early 21st century was no accidental
occurrence. Ultimately, it was by design.

The crusade to dismantle A.Q. Khan’s network has suffered
many casualties. Several whistleblowers have found their careers
ended and their reputations tarnished. Richard Barlow, Sibel
Edmonds, Atif Amin, and Valerie Plame are some of those who lie
among the ranks of the fallen. A brief examination of these
whistleblowers should adequately illustrate the determination of
the Establishment to protect and shepherd the Khan network.

In 2000, Atif Amin, the senior customs investigator leading
British efforts to halt the Khan network, discovered British and
American complicity (Borger and Cobain). Amin was the head
investigator in Operation Akin, the British Customs investigation
into the involvement of British companies with the Khan network
(ibid). Amin had discovered “evidence in Dubai of the Khan
network’s involvement in establishing Libya’s nuclear
programme (sic)” (ibid). Instead of allowing Operation Akin
to stop Libya’s program and the Khan network’s
contribution, Amin was ordered to cease his investigation (ibid).
All of this was done at the request of the CIA and MI6 (ibid).

Instead of being rewarded for his heroic efforts, Amin was
treated like an “enemy of the state.” On December 5,
2007, authorities from Britain’s Police Complaints Commission
and investigators from the Hampshire police department descended
upon Amin’s home and conducted a search (ibid). According to
these authorities, Amin had passed classified custom reports to
investigative journalists David Armstrong and Joseph Trento (ibid).
The journalists, in turn, used these reports to produce their book
America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise
(ibid). Amin and Operation Akin were the focus of the book, but
Armstrong holds that Amin was the not the source (ibid). Whether or
not Amin passed information to the American reporters, his attempts
to prevent Khan from spreading nuclear materials to some of the
most dangerous regimes on the planet made him a target of one of
the very governments that claims to be protecting its people from
nuclear proliferation.

Amin’s story is very similar to that of Richard Barlow, a
CIA counter-proliferation officer. In 1985, Barlow joined the CIA
and, in very short order, learned that U.S. officials knew about
the activities of the Khan network and were doing nothing to stop
it (Ryland). If that wasn’t bad enough, Barlow discovered
that State Department officials were actually assisting the Khan
network with procurement (ibid). These same officials became
Khan’s accomplices, helping targets of undercover operations
avoid arrest (ibid). State Department operatives even violated the
law by approving export licenses for restricted goods (ibid).

Barlow decided not to join the ranks of the complacent and
complicit. In 1987, the CIA officer carried out an operation that
led to the arrest of Khan operatives working in the United States
(ibid). These arrests “came with the full support and
knowledge of the highest of the CIA and the Reagan
administration” (ibid).

Barlow’s operation seriously threatened Western support of
the Khan network. The Khan network agents had violated provisions
of the Solarz Amendment, which stipulated that if Pakistan was
discovered to be involved in proliferation activities, then
American aid would cease (ibid). Barlow appeared before the author
of the Solarz Amendment, Stephen Solarz, and his Subcommittee on
Asian and Pacific Affairs and told everything he knew (ibid).
Solarz was certainly not someone who could be trusted. His name has
recently emerged in connection with the American Turkish Council
(ATC), a sister organization to the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (Giraldi). The ATC is known to act as a surrogate for
Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
because Turks do not raise as much suspicion (ibid).

Still, Barlow’s revelations were too great to be ignored.
Many in Congress were outraged to learn that Pakistan was breaking
U.S. nuclear export laws with the active assistance of U.S.
officials and the full knowledge of the U.S. Intelligence
Community. The incident forced the Reagan administration to
activate the Solarz Amendment for the first time (Ryland). The
first time, however, would prove to also be the last time. Reagan
immediately reversed course and annulled the amendment through an
invocation of “a national security waiver provision in the
law” (ibid).

Barlow had the support of many courageous and honest elements
within the government. The CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence
and the State Department’s non-proliferation staff considered
Barlow to be a hero who had brought their concerns into the
spotlight (ibid). His operation against the Khan network, however,
won him many enemies. The CIA’s Directorate of Operations
(DO) was one of the groups that were not pleased with
Barlow’s actions (ibid). It should be remembered that
Khan’s sponsors, the Safari Club, had helped the DO continue
with covert operations after the Congressional purse strings were
pulled away. Barlow has stated that the DO “did make my life
miserable and damaged my career prospects” (ibid).
Eventually, the pressure led to Barlow leaving the CIA (ibid). A
serious blow had been dealt to the Agency’s
counter-proliferation faction.

Western cooperation with the Khan network has even been revealed
by one of America’s most high-profile national security
whistleblowers: former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. Edmonds joined
the Bureau in 2001, nine days after the September 11 attacks
(Giraldi). While with the FBI, she worked with the translations
section of the Washington office, listening to hundreds of
intercepted phone calls of individuals the Bureau considered
“persons of interest” (ibid). One of those
“persons of interest” was Marc Grossman, retired
American Ambassador to Turkey and civil servant (ibid). Grossman
became the focus of an FBI investigation in 2001 and 2002 when he
held the third highest position in the State Department, the
undersecretary of state for political affairs (ibid). According to
Edmonds, FBI wiretaps reveal that Grossman warned a Turkish Embassy
official that Brewster Jennings and Associates, an ostensible
consultancy brass plate firm, was really a front for a CIA weapons
proliferation unit (ibid). This was particularly significant,
Edmonds contends, since the Turks “often acted as a conduit
for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy
agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion”
(“For Sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets”). The
Brewster Jennings unit had been quite effective in penetrating the
Khan network. Grossman’s warning, which amounted to a tip-off
to the Pakistanis, changed all that. Former CIA officer Philip
Giraldi makes it clear that the operation was compromised, stating:
“It is to be assumed that the information was then passed on
to the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network” (ibid).

Brewster Jennings was also the unit of CIA operative Valerie
Plame, whose cover was supposedly blown by a column by the deceased
Robert Novak (ibid). But when the time came to assign blame for
Plame’s exposure, Grossman was not touched. Instead, he
finished his government service and went on to serve as the vice
chairman of the Cohen Group,” “founded by Clinton
defense secretary William Cohen, where he reportedly earns a
seven-figure salary, much of it coming from representing
Turkey” (ibid).

On the other hand, Edmond’s patriotism was met with a
campaign of persecution that beggars description. When she voiced
her concerns to her superiors, Edmonds was threatened (ibid). The
FBI’s refusal to act on her warnings led to Edmonds
contacting the Justice Department and two senators on the Judiciary
Committee, Charles Grassley and Patrick Leahy (ibid). A DOJ
polygraph test revealed that Edmonds “was not deceptive in
her answers” (ibid). Two weeks later, Edmonds was fired from
the FBI and her home computer was seized. Even Edmond’s
family in Turkey was not immune. Family members were interrogated
by the police under threats that they would be arrested if they did
not cooperate (ibid). Attempts by Edmonds’s attorney to
obtain documents concerning her firing led to Attorney General John
Ashcroft imposing a state-secrets gag order (ibid). While Edmonds
has not ceased in her attempts to get the truth out, she still
faces fierce opposition from those who do not want their misdeeds
revealed.

Economic determinism holds sway in the thinking of both
alternative and mainstream researchers. This flawed view holds that
players in the realms of politics, finance, and social engineering
are motivated strictly by money. The appeal of this view is
understandable, given the fact that many mysteries are solved and
conspiracies are exposed merely by “following the
money.” Proponents of this view, however, fail to recognize
that money is merely a means to an end. As a result, deeper
ideological motivations for world events are bleached out in the
final analysis. Unfortunately, this is the case with most of the
research written over the Khan network. Certainly, many pockets
were lined as a result of Khan spreading nuclear materials across
the globe. The political, social, and psychological impacts of
nuclear proliferation, however, suggest that there are deeper
ideological reasons for helping rogue nations and fanatical regimes
procure the most destructive weapon known to mankind.

These deeper ideological reasons stem from what literary critic
H. Bruce Franklin describes as a “cult of the
superweapon,” which “originated as a distinct
phenomenon between 1880 and what we now nonchalantly call the First
World War, in the form of future wars imagined by American authors
of fiction” (War Stars: The Superweapon and the
American Imagination 5). The term “cult” as it
is invoked here does not connote a coherent organization or
formalized institution. Instead, it connotes a faddish obsession
with a concept, idea, or principle. In this case, the obsession was
with the notion of a world order where compliance among nations was
maintained through a monopoly on lethal force. The maintenance of
that monopoly hinged on the exclusive ownership of the
superweapon.

This continuity of thought would find several devotees among the
power elite. Central to the Utopian vision of this bizarre and
sinister subset of oligarchs was a world order whose hegemony was
maintained through a discourse of fear. Faced with potential
annihilation by the superweapon, the people of the world could be
incentivized to accept an undemocratic and oppressive system of
global governance as an alternative to extinction.

The form of global government advocated by several members of
this cult would intermittently oscillate between a unilateral model
(i.e., Pax Americana) and a multilateral model (i.e.,
Pax Universalis). The latter would be euphemistically
dubbed a “new world order” and would stipulate the
subordination of all nation-states to an omnipotent supra-national
entity. The former would be instantiated under the appellation of
“empire,” with America maintaining supremacy through a
monopoly over the superweapon. The earliest American nuclear
fantasies allegorically gesticulated towards this model. While the
proponents of both models would occasionally feud with each other,
the dialectical commonalities shared by the polar opponents made
such disputes superficial at best. Whatever model would hold sway,
unilateral or multilateral, the outcome would remain the same:
global totalitarianism.

That a literary subgenre could inspire future projects in
nuclear blackmail bespeaks the normative power of fiction. Authors
with questionable ideological propensities have often harnessed
this normative power on behalf of radical agendas. Through the
circulation of normative fiction, audiences are provided with
semiotic intimations of coming events. Those who are convinced of
the alleged inevitability of these coming events will either
passively accept them or actively work to tangibly enact them.
Thus, when the future unfolds as planned, it assumes the
paradigmatic character of the “fiction” that foretold
it. Herein is the concept of predictive programming. Michael
Hoffman defines predictive programming as follows: "Predictive
programming works by means of the propagation of the illusion of an
infallibly accurate vision of how the world is going to look in the
future" (205).

Thanks to irresponsible pseudo-researchers like Alan Watt,
predictive programming is one concept in conspiratorial research
that is in danger of falling into disrepute. The problem is the
ridiculously elastic criterion that some use to categorize certain
films, books, and TV shows as “predictive programming.”
Suddenly, everything from an innocuous episode of Gilligan’s
Island to an inane garage sale sign can be classified as
“predictive programming.” Moreover, those who
carelessly assign the appellation of “predictive
programming” cannot compellingly demonstrate any degree of
intertextuality between fictional narratives and actual events.
Sadly, such irresponsibility is swiftly relegating the concept of
predictive programming to the realm of paranoid fantasy.

Nevertheless, one can hardly deny that certain films, TV
programs, and books have had a normative impact on the dominant
culture. Artistic works within the genre of science fiction have
been particularly influential among audiences. What is being
described here is not some incredibly sophisticated system of
brainwashing. Operating in a normative capacity, science fiction
does not necessarily “make people behave in ways they
otherwise would not” (Bartter 169). This perception of
science fiction typically engenders “either the tacit
justification for propaganda, or the reverse, the explicit
justification for censorship” (169). However, it is through
the presentation of possibilities that the normative power of
science fiction is most effectively demonstrated. Martha A. Bartter
states:

[F]iction can represent possibilities for action to a large
number of people in such a way that they can more clearly perceive
possible choices and the various socio-cultural sanctions attached
to those choices. The very act of considering choices irrevocably
alters our assumptions about ways we may act, and since actions
derive from assumptions (in the sense that both doing and choosing
not to do must be considered actions), fiction can indeed endanger
the status quo. The censors are right—for the wrong
reasons. (169)

If the possibilities presented by normative fiction are given
serious socio-cultural currency, then they can give rise to
revisions in the status quo and the emergence of new cultural
paradigms. Hypothetical scenarios of a normative nature can
challenge the underlying assumptions of the current culture. Of
course, when one challenges the dominant Weltanschauung,
one must pose a viable alternative. To such an end, fiction can
prescribe alternative values, principles, philosophies, and
Weltanschauungs. Once fiction starts making such
prescriptions, it becomes normative in character.

Yet, normative fiction also exhibits an “inherent
ambiguity” (169). Although it calls the status quo
into question, normative fiction simultaneously reinforces some of
the values of the dominant paradigm. Paradoxical though it may
seem, normative fiction combines conformity and rebellion to create
a potent socio-cultural solvent. Bartter explains:

On the one hand, every fiction arises from a particular time and
place; it demonstrates to its hearers/readers a tacit consensus
regarding cultural norms. On the other hand, and at the same
time, it can introduce to its readers possibilities that they
previously did not know or had not considered, and make these
possibilities vividly “real” by fictional devices such
as plot, character, setting, etc. Through a “willing
suspension of disbelief,” readers conduct socio-cultural
gedankenexperimente: they test how such ideas might work
out in reality and what effects they might produce, and consider
the possibility of a new consensus. (169)

Gedankenexperimente is the German word for
“thought experiment.” The gedankenexperimente
involves the tangible enactment of hypothetical scenarios in hopes
of re-sculpting reality and creating a “new consensus.”
Ideas are tested and the underlying assumptions of the current
culture are called into question. As the socio-cultural thought
experiment progresses, it might give rise to revisions in the
status quo and the emergence of new cultural paradigms.
Thus, the world of fact begins to more closely mirror the world of
fiction. The a priori assumptions of science fiction
literature become the de facto precepts of culture itself.
In a sense, fiction becomes a precursor to fact.

The famous science fiction writer and editor John W. Campbell
proposed that sci-fi presented an “unparalleled opportunity
for socio-cultural thought experiments” (183). As such, some
science fiction can inspire tectonic shifts in society and culture.
The nature of these shifts depends upon the nature of the normative
statements that inspired them. For instance, the techno-Utopian
premises of much science fiction can be somewhat troubling,
especially in light of the questionable outcomes of most
sociopolitical Utopian movements (e.g., communism, fascism, and
other varieties of socialism). To be sure, the techno-Utopian might
argue that unfettered scientific progress will facilitate social
progress. Yet, theoreticians like Theodor Adorno have correctly
identified the disjunction between scientific progress and social
progress, citing Nazi Germany as a prime example. Nevertheless,
several science fiction writers communicate techno-Utopian
prescriptions through their narratives. Such normative seeds can
find fertile soil within the minds of audiences who have already
made a “willing suspension of disbelief.” At that
point, a socio-cultural gedankenexperimente in
techno-Utopianism might begin. In fact, many such thought
experiments have already taken place, as is evidenced by sizable
scientistic cults like Scientology.

Perhaps the socio-cultural gedankenexperimente with the
broadest ramifications for mankind is the Manhattan Project. None
other than science fiction icon H.G. Wells can be connected with
the advent of nuclear warfare. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-American
physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction and worked on
the Manhattan Project, read Wells’ The World Set
Free (Bartter 177). In this novel, Wells coined the term
“atomic bomb” (176). Bartter states: “In a very
real sense, through Szilard, Wells designed the Manhattan
Project” (177). In fact, Wells’ novel even inspired the
highly compartmentalized organizational framework of the Project.
In turn, this organizational framework promoted an overall milieu
of obscurantism. Bartter elaborates:

One of its (the Manhattan Project’s) most important
aspects was the application of ` assembly-line techniques to
scientific research. By dividing the scientists into teams, each
doing a small portion of the research, a high level of secrecy
could be imposed on a discipline officially dedicated to the free
exchange of information.

Many young scientists were eager to join the Project because it
gave them a chance to do “cutting edge” work while
serving their country. Few argued against the stifling secrecy;
even fewer felt they could properly direct how their work should be
used. That these assumptions are somewhat self-contradictory does
not make them less powerful, merely less conscious. Scientists
themselves read science fiction; many publicly admitted that such
reading led them to their careers in science. Science fiction
tacitly assumes that the role of scientist included that of
alchemist as well; it seems that some Manhattan Project scientists
were influenced by these assumptions. (177)

It is interesting that the invention of a weapon that would
forever alter warfare was inspired by a man like Wells. Given his
ideological heritage and elitist pedigree, Wells had good reason to
encourage the introduction of a super-weapon that would plunge
traditional international politics into an ontological and
epistemological crisis. A cursory perusal of Wells’
résumé reveals his motive for promulgating the
pervasive nuclear anxiety that would eventually create the
political discourse of fear that underpinned the Cold War.

Wells held many dubious organizational affiliations. Among one
of them was the Coefficients Club. Formed by Fabian socialists
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, this organization assembled some of
Britain's most prominent social critics and thinkers to discuss the
course of the British Empire (“Coefficients (dining
club),” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia). In
essence, the Club promoted a world state, albeit a unilaterally
initiated form of global government dominated by Britain (i.e., a
Pax Britannia). Wells articulates this globalist vision in
Experiments in Autobiography:

The British Empire . . . had to be the precursor of a
world-state or nothing . . . It was possible for the Germans and
Austrians to hold together in their Zollverein (tariff and trade
bloc) because they were placed like a clenched fist in the centre
of Europe. But the British Empire was like an open hand all over
the world. It had no natural economic unity and it could maintain
no artificial economic unity. Its essential unity must be a unity
of great ideas embodied in the English speech and literature.
(Experiments in Autobiography 652)

One of the Club's members was none other than socialist and
population control advocate Bertrand Russell. According to Russell,
several members harbored an overwhelming preoccupation with
war:

...in 1902, I became a member of a small dining club called the
Coefficients, got up by Sidney Webb for the purpose of considering
political questions from a more or less Imperialist point of view.
It was in this club that I first became acquainted with H. G.
Wells, of whom I had never heard until then. His point of view was
more sympathetic to me than that of any member. Most of the
members, in fact, shocked me profoundly. I remember Amery's eyes
gleaming with blood-lust at the thought of a war with America, in
which, as he said with exultation, we should have to arm the whole
adult male population. One evening Sir Edward Grey (not then in
office) made a speech advocating the policy of Entente, which had
not yet been adopted by the Government. I stated my objections to
the policy very forcibly, and pointed out the likelyhood of its
leading to war, but no one agreed with me, so I resigned from the
Club. It will be seen that I began my opposition to the first war
at the earliest possible moment. (230)

His radical ideological pedigree aside, Russell’s
misgivings with the Club weren’t without substance. One Club
member, Leopold Maxse, consistently promoted a militant stance
against Germany:

Maxse was anti-German in the pre-war period and argued that the
1918 victory against Germany gave the Allies a fleeting opportunity
to destroy German power. He viewed the Treaty of Versailles as
ineffectual towards that aim and blamed Allied politicians, Lloyd
George especially, for bowing to President Wilson's pressure to
make the treaty less harsh. (“Leopold Maxse,”
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia)

Evidently, this preoccupation with war appealed to Wells, whose
fictional works exhibited some distinctly Darwinian militarist
themes. Richard Weikart distills the Weltanschauung of the
Darwinian militarist:

Darwinian militarists claimed that universal biological laws
decreed the inevitability of war. Humans could not, any more than
any other animal, opt out of the struggle for existence,
since—as Darwin had explained based on his reading of
Malthus—population expands faster than the food supply. War
was thus a natural and necessary element of human competition that
selects the “most fit” and leads to biological
adaptation or—as most preferred to think—to progress.
Not only Germans, but Anglo American social Darwinists justified
war as a natural and inevitable part of the universal struggle for
existence. The famous American sociologist William Graham Sumner,
one of the most influential social Darwinists in the late
nineteenth century, conceded, “It is the [Darwinian]
competition for life… which makes war, and that is why war
has always existed and always will.” (165-66)

Given the fact that Darwinian militarism was heavily informed by
Malthus’ statistical “research,” it is quite
ironic that the Coefficients’ warmongering would even disturb
a Malthusian like Russell. After all, in Malthus’ view, war
served a necessary function in checking population growth.
Russell’s unsettling preoccupation with population control
actually harmonized rather well with the advocacy of endless
conflict. Nevertheless, such warlike notions represented a point of
departure between Russell and the Coefficients.

Again, Russell’s misgivings weren’t without
justification. By portraying war as a preordained Consequence of
the evolutionary development of man, Darwinian militarism condemned
the whole human race to perpetual conflict. Moreover, Darwinian
militarism rationalized the rejection of moral accountability and a
Nietzsche-esque veneration of war:

By claiming that war is biologically determined, Darwinian
militarists denied that moral considerations could be applied to
war. In their view wars were not caused by free human choices, but
by biological processes. Blaming persons or nations for waging war
is thus senseless, since they are merely blindly following natural
laws. Further, opposition to war and militarism is futile,
according to Darwinian militarists, who regularly scoffed at peace
activists for simply not understanding scientific principles.
(166)

Such a militaristic view of the world was merely the logical
outworking of Darwinism, which consistently portrayed life as a
struggle for survival. Wells was certainly no stranger to the
bloody Weltanschauung of Darwinism. The budding scribe of
“scientific romances” studied at the Normal School of
Science in South Kensington under Darwin's chief apologist, Thomas
Henry Huxley. In Dope, Inc., associates of political
dissident Lyndon LaRouche identify Huxley as “a founder of
the Rhodes Roundtable group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold
Toynbee” (537). Toynbee advanced a thesis concerning the
perpetuation of global oligarchy. Noting the inexorable decline of
past empires -- the Roman Empire, the Egyptian Pharaohs,
etc.--Toynbee argued that imperial regimes could be sustained
through the initiation and tutelage of a priesthood committed to
the precepts of oligarchy (537). The British Round Table Groups
represented a tangible enactment of this prescriptive thesis.

The Round Table Groups would form the Royal Institute for
International Affairs, which would establish a stateside branch
known as the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States. The
CFR wields a considerable amount of influence over U.S. foreign
policy and several of its members are dedicated to expediting
America’s assimilation into a one-world socialist
totalitarian government. Wells’ work, both fictional and
nonfictional, teems with references to and promotions of such a
globalist vision. In turn, this vision represents a speculative
extrapolation of evolutionary theory into “such
sociopolitical arrangements as corporations and nations”
(Martin 314-15). Thus, the cause of globalism actually qualifies as
“sociopolitical Darwinism” (314-15). In promoting
global governance, Wells was merely remaining consistent with his
rigidly Darwinian view of the world.

Intimations of Wells’ own sociopolitical Darwinian
pedigree emerge throughout his sci-fi classics. For instance, in
H.G. Wells and the Culminating Ape; Biological Themes and
Imaginative Obsessions, literary critic Peter Kemp
characterizes The Time Machine as a “blend of
Marx and Darwin” (14). Not surprisingly, The Time
Machine presents a future where an ignorant and indolent
race (called the Eloi) luxuriates in a pastoral, communist society.
Given the agrarian variety of socialism invoked by Wells, one might
discern shades of Maoism and the Khmer Rouge. Yet, the Eloi’s
Utopian existence does not come without a price. They are subjected
to an inherently predatory system governed by the Morlocks.
Essentially, Wells’ Time Machine allegorically
divided mankind into two distinct breeds: ranchers and livestock.
In Wells’ view, the great mass of humanity was analogous to
the Eloi, a herd whose numbers had to be culled. In order to carry
out this unsavory, yet necessary task, a far less compassionate
breed of men was required. Like the Morlocks, such men would appear
to be monsters to the commoner. Nevertheless, Wells felt that such
men should dominate his hypothetical world state, which he also
dubbed the “New Republic”:

The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in
facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense
of the possibilities of life than we possess. They will have an
ideal that will make killing worth the while; like Abraham, they
will have the faith to kill, and they will have no superstitions
about death. They will naturally regard the modest suicide of
incurably melancholy, or diseased or helpless persons as a high and
courageous act of duty rather than a crime.
(Anticipations 184)

Other pieces of Wells’ science fiction underscore his
Darwinian militarist propensities. For instance, War of the
Worlds depicts interplanetary warfare as a macrocosmic
extension of natural selection (Williamson 189-95). This theme
would eventually pervade the literary genre of science fiction:

Science fiction is admittedly almost impossible to define;
readers all think they know what it is and yet no definition will
cover all its various aspects. However, I would suggest that
evolution, as presented by Wells, that is a kind of mutation
resulting in the confrontation of man with different species, is
one of the main themes of modern science fiction. (Vernier 85)

This observation brings into clearer focus the dialectical
framework intrinsic to evolutionary theory. The organism (thesis)
comes into conflict with nature (antithesis) resulting in a newly
enhanced species (synthesis), the culmination of the evolutionary
process (Marrs 127). Of course, in such a world of ongoing
conflict, violence and bloodshed are central to progress. Thus,
Darwin's theory 'gave credence to the Hegelian notion that human
culture had ascended from brutal beginnings' (Taylor, 386).

At this juncture, it is interesting to recall that war with
Germany was the chief desire of Leopold Maxse, one of Wells’
associates in the Coefficients Club. Interestingly enough, Wells
predicted the rise of Nazi Germany and the Second World War in
The Shape of Things to Come. The fact that Wells
"predicted" this suggests that he was privy to certain plans. Such
plans may have circulated within the Coefficients Club, among other
elitist think tanks of the time. Whatever the case may be, World
War II certainly synchronized with the Darwinian militarist
Weltanschauung of Wells and his other colleagues.

Of course, WWII came to an explosive end with the dropping of
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the advent of nuclear
warfare, the world would witness the dialectical manipulation of
the Cold War. East and West would be pitted against one another in
a calculated game of chicken. Through the policy of containment
that was implemented by the Truman Administration, the communist
threat was maintained as an element of stability. This policy
continued throughout the Korean and Vietnam Wars, which were
deliberately mismanaged to perpetuate the dialectic of East vs.
West. The late 60s witnessed détente, which lead to an
ostensible easing of tensions between the United States and the
Soviet Union. However, American-Soviet relations disintegrated with
the close of the 70s and, throughout the 80s, the metastasis of the
“Evil Empire” was a preeminent fear.

Within this dialectical climate, the prospect of nuclear
annihilation was consistently reiterated as a compelling incentive
for dismantling the nation-state system and establishing a global
government. Such a global government would satisfy the core
normative contention of Wells’ The Shape of Things to
Come: "The existence of independent sovereign states IS war,
white or red, and only an elaborate mis-education blinded the world
to this elementary fact."

Herein is probably Wells’ true motive for encouraging the
invention of the world’s first super-weapon. The cause of
world political unification was largely premised upon fear and
nothing had generated fear like the possibility of nuclear war. For
decades, prominent writers such as Wells had drawn an unfounded
correlation between war and the sovereign state. In turn, scholars,
journalists, and politicians had publicly reiterated this
correlation ad nauseum. Thus, when the specter of nuclear
war reared its ugly head, the nation-state was viewed as its
natural progenitor. Just such a contention is set forth in
The World Set Free. Wells opens the novel with an
airstrike that destroys the War Control Centre of England and
France. In retaliation, a “rather young brutish aviator with
a bullet head” drops an atomic bomb on Berlin. This
conflagration triggers an enormous global conflict:

For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of
destruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought to
anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium of
panic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had
assailed Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had
attacked Japan, India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit of
fire spouting death and flame; the redoubtable King of the Balkans
was mobilising. It must have seemed plain at last to every one in
those days that the world was slipping headlong to anarchy. By the
spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres, and every week
added to their number, roared the unquenchable crimson
conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy fabric of the
world's credit had vanished, industry was completely disorganised
and every city, every thickly populated area was starving or
trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the capital cities of
the world were burning; millions of people had already perished,
and over great areas government was at an end. Humanity has been
compared by one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles
matches in his sleep and wakes to find himself in flames.

Contemptuously portraying the major participants in this
conflict as a “mere cult of warfare,” Wells presents
the normative contention that “because of the development of
scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate
sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world.”
Moreover, Wells argues that “to attempt to keep on with the
old system is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and
perhaps to destroy our race altogether.” Wells presents the
supposed solution with the “proclamation of the end of the
war and the establishment of a world government.”:

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of
cities and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of
their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly
held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.
To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists, men were made
nascent; they were released from old ties; for good or evil they
were ready for new associations. The council carried them forward
for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached their destination King
Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back to an endless chain
of evils. But his task would have been a harder one than the
council's. The moral shock of the atomic bombs had been a profound
one, and for a while the cunning side of the human animal was
overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital necessity for
reconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered together,
scared at their own consequences; men thought twice before they
sought mean advantages in the face of the unusual eagerness to
realise new aspirations, and when at last the weeds revived again
and 'claims' began to sprout, they sprouted upon the stony soil of
law-courts reformed, of laws that pointed to the future instead of
the past, and under the blazing sunshine of a transforming world. A
new literature, a new interpretation of history were springing into
existence, a new teaching was already in the schools, a new faith
in the young.

Wells’ imaginative seeds eventually took root within the
mind of Leo Szilard, resulting in the socio-cultural
gedankenexperimente of the Manhattan Project:

In 1932, many years after the first appearance of The
World Set Free, the Hungarian nuclear physicist Leo Szilard
read the novel and admitted in his memoirs that it gave him the
idea for an atomic bomb. When, in 1932, Szilard heard of the work
of Otto Hahn in Berlin with uranium fission, he realized that such
a weapon now actually possible. “All the things which H.G.
Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.” He shared his
thoughts with his old friend and colleague Albert Einstein, who
signed and sent a letter on the subject (much of it actually
written by Szilard) to President Roosevelt. The president promptly
authorized the formation of an “Advisory Committee on
Uranium” to study their ideas. In time the work of this
committee led to the Manhattan Project and the invention of atomic
bombs, the same bombs that ended World War II and initiated a
global scramble to acquire nuclear weapons that is still in
progress and may some day lead to the collapse of civilization. The
survivors — if any — would have reason to hold H.G.
Wells personally responsible. (Wagar 146)

Indeed, Wells could be held accountable for any nuclear war that
potentially looms on the horizon. Yet, Wells was not only the
originator of nuclear war. He was also one of the foremost
purveyors of global tyranny under the euphemistic appellation of a
“new world order.” The World Set Free
established a discourse of fear. That discourse of fear cemented
the authority of national security states in both America and
Russia, thereby increasing the prospect of a Hegelian synthesis
between the two. The world was further incentivized to acquiesce to
this totalitarian societal configuration with the fear of nuclear
annihilation. In essence, the name of the game was nuclear
blackmail.

Seldom do dangerous ideas need assistance in their spread, and
Wells’ concept of the nuclear fantasy certainly proves that
point. Stories of weapons of mass destruction paving the way for
world government gained imaginative momentum among many science
fiction writers who were building upon ideas popularized by
Wells.

Nuclear fantasies had a profound influence on the thinking of
Harry Truman, which is important given the fact that he is credited
with the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
According to H. Bruce Franklin, Truman’s decision was
“influenced by his belief that this demonstration of the
ultimate superweapon might indeed bring an end to war”
(“Eternally safe for democracy: the final solution of
American science fiction” 157). What had caused Truman to
place his faith in a weapon that constitutes the Promethean fire of
science? Truman’s initiation into the cult of the superweapon
is most likely found in the pages of McClure’s
magazine (157). As a young farmer in Missouri, Truman subscribed to
this magazine and avidly devoured its stories, which included tales
of superweapons and global wars leading to peace and unification
ushered in by a world government (157). Truman even wrote about his
love for McClure’s in a letter to his sweetheart
Bess in 1913, stating: “I suppose I’ll have to renew my
subscription to McClure’s now so I won’t miss
a number” (157).

In 1910, a story entitled “The Unparalleled
Invasion” appeared in the pages of McClure’s
(157). Authored by raving Anglophile Jack London, the story
forecasts a world threatened by hostile hordes of Chinese who begin
a campaign for world domination in the year 1975 (156). Salvation
comes, however, in the form of a superweapon conceived and created
by an American scientist (156). While London’s weapon is
biological in nature, the aftermath of its use is comparable to a
nuclear bomb. The entire population of China is infected with
“bacteria, and germs, and microbes, and bacilli, cultured in
the laboratories of the West” (156). This potent mixture is
delivered by missiles fired from American airships (156). The end
result is genocide (156). Only a few survivors remain after the
attack and they are executed in very short order (156).

The stories of superweapons that influenced Truman’s
generation almost always ended with the complete extermination of
black, red, or yellow people (156). It is almost as if the
superweapon was ethno-specific in nature. The dreaded “Yellow
Peril” was the threat most often presented and according to
Franklin, this anti-Asian literature was “especially
ferocious” (156). This should come as little surprise. As
Gene Wolfe states in the introduction of Brave New Words: The
Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction: “science fiction
is of Anglo-American growth” (Prucher xix). It seems that
Americans were being conditioned to destroy the Western
elites’ competitors in the great game for world hegemony.

The same year London’s story appeared in the pages of
McClure’s, Truman happened upon an earlier version of the
same tale depicting “airships fighting the final dreadful war
to end all wars and thus bringing about a prosperous, unified
world” (“Eternally safe for democracy: the final
solution of American science fiction” 157). This story, a
science fiction poem written by Tennyson and entitled
“Locksley Hall,” was particularly inspirational to the
young, impressionable farmer from Missouri (157). In fact, Truman
was so moved by the poem that he copied down ten lines from the
piece and placed them in his wallet (157). Those ten lines would
follow Truman everywhere he went for the next 35 years. They would
reemerge from his pocket again in July 1945, when the now-President
Truman was on his way to the historic Potsdam Conference (157).
During this trip, which was intended to shape the post-war order,
Truman retrieved a worn slip of paper from his wallet and recited
the ten lines he had copied down in his youth to a reporter (157).
Truman’s copied portion included the following lines:

…the war-drums throbb’d no longer, and the
battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. (Qutd. in
“Eternally safe for democracy: the final solution of American
science fiction” 157)

Obviously, Truman hoped that a world government would grow out
of the Potsdam Conference, and he believed the United States would
soon have a weapon capable of compelling the rest of the nations to
accept his desired model of world order.

Truman seems to have been following a script presented in Roy
Norton’s 1907 story entitled “The Vanishing
Fleet” (157). This story, which appeared in serialized form
in the Associated Sunday Magazines, depicts a Japanese
sneak attack bearing eerie resemblance to the Pearl Harbor attack
that would occur 34 years later (157-58). While the Japanese deal
America a harsh blow, American ingenuity, as is so often the case
in nuclear fantasies, comes to the rescue as American scientists
invent the ultimate weapons powered by radioactivity (158). Those
weapons, a fleet of giant “radioplanes,” are
“capable of sweeping off the seas entire fleets of enemy
warships” (158).

The President in Norton’s story knows very well that the
Japanese might actually surrender if they learn of America’s
new weapon (158). The President, however, decides to keep the
existence of the radioplanes a secret, leaving the Japanese secure
in their belief that they have the upper-hand (158). Secrecy,
explains the President, will prevent America from losing the
perfect opportunity to demonstrate the destructive force of the new
weapon (158). The President believes that the weapon will only have
to be employed once to convince the rest of the world that the time
has come to make war a distant memory (158). Armed with nuclear
vengeance, the radioplanes conduct “the last great battle in
history,” which ends in victory for America (158). With the
enemy vanquished, the President proudly declares: “The United
States, having faith in the Anglo-Saxon race as… the most
peaceful and conservative, has formed an alliance… with
Great Britain” (158). Norton’s story, like much of the
nuclear fantasies at the time, promoted a model of world order that
favored Anglo-American hegemony (158). For this reason, the cult of
the superweapon would possess Anglophile features until after World
War Two, when the majority of the global oligarchical establishment
began favoring the idea of a Pax Universalis in
contradistinction to a Pax Americana.

Truman’s immersion in nuclear fantasies may have caused
him to cast himself in the role of the President in Norton’s
story, either consciously or unconsciously. Several agents of the
power elite were certainly in place to guarantee that
Norton’s President was channeled through Truman. Secretary of
War Henry Stimson was one such agent. Stimson oversaw the
development of the atomic bomb and advised both Roosevelt and
Truman concerning the weapon. It was in this role that Stimson
helped persuade Truman that the bomb must be used. In the aftermath
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stimson explained that the bomb’s
use was an absolute necessity because “that was the only way
to reawaken the world to the necessity of abolishing war
altogether. No technological demonstration… could take the
place of the actual use with it, horrible results” (163).
These are the exact same sentiments expressed by the President in
The Vanishing Fleets.

The Vanishing Fleets proffered the normative claim
that using the bomb was an inescapable and non-negotiable course of
action. In turn, this contention might have engendered the Truman
administration’s refusal to even marginally acknowledge
Japan’s peace overtures. The Japanese began suing for peace
as earlier as February 14, 1945, when a decoded message between
Japan and Russia expressing a desire to surrender was brought to
the attention of the American government (Epperson 299). Army Chief
of Staff George Marshall expressed skepticism and the government
dismissed the opportunity (299).

Four months later, Japan contacted Russia again expressing a
desire to end the war (299). Once again, America intercepted these
messages and did not take advantage of the opportunity (299). This
suggests that the paradigmatic template of Norton’s President
had been superimposed on Truman and a demonstration of the
superweapon was a foregone conclusion.

On August 6, 1945, the dreaded mushroom cloud leapt off the
pages of Norton’s fiction and hovered above a devastated
Hiroshima, Japan. To its credit, the American Air Force dropped
720,000 leaflets over the city to warn the inhabitants that
Hiroshima could expect to be obliterated if an immediate Japanese
surrender was not received (299). Still, the decision to strike a
civilian target with such a destructive weapon was morally
questionable, to say the very least.

The decision to drop the bomb on Nagasaki involved even less
restraint and mercy. At the highest levels of government, the
necessity of a second bomb was not in question (300). The
possibility that Russia’s entry into the war had accelerated
Japan’s plans to surrender was not even discussed (300).

Even a cursory evaluation of the cult of the superweapon reveals
the particularly brutal and vicious character of this cultural
phenomenon. The cult’s ruthless promotion of genocide and
vision a world state maintained by nuclear anxiety bespeak a
particular savage Weltanschauung. Yet, there may be a
darker, even occult ideational thread running through the cult of
the superweapon. The very target selections for the first two
atomic bombs bespeak an antichristic continuity of thought. Rose
Martin reveals that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki… were the
chief centers in Japan of a native Christian population”
(46). Of course, the values advocated by the cult of superweapon
were antithetical to the Christian Weltanschauung, a
belief system embraced by the populations of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki paved the way for an ambitious proposal
for institutionalizing U.S. global supremacy. Known as the Baruch
Plan, the concept was developed in “a serialized science
fiction novel read by millions of Americans” entitled
Lightning in the Night (“Eternally safe for
democracy: the final solution of American science fiction”
159). This story ran in Liberty, one of America’s
top three magazines, from August to November of 1940 (159).

The story opens five years in the future, where a dark and dire
situation has fallen over America and its allies. Britain and
France are completely subjugated by German and Axis forces (159).
Meanwhile, Japan and the Soviet Union launch a sneak attack on
Hawaii that, like the attack depicted in Norton’s The
Vanishing Fleets, seems to be a chilling foreshadowing of
the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack (159). American cities are
destroyed by attacks carried out by Japanese, Soviet, and Nazi
bombers (159). America finds itself threatened on three fronts by
Soviet, Japanese, Mexican, and German forces (159-60).

In the midst of this growing crisis, Hitler demands and receives
an audience with the President of the United States (160). During
the meeting, Hitler reveals that the Nazis have discovered the
“key to atomic energy” and will soon possess the
“power to blow entire cities off the face of the earth”
(160). Hitler then warns that the Reich will soon be able to
unleash the destructive power of nuclear weapons within one short
month (160). The German leader levels an ultimatum: America has a
one month grace period to surrender or be engulfed in nuclear fire
(160). The November 9 installment ends on this dark note, leaving
the reader believing that America faces a future of enslavement if
the arms race is lost (160).

In the final installment, however, America turns the tables as
the President reveals that America has developed its own nuclear
weapon in complete secret (160). Hidden away from sight, the
nation’s “most ingenious and resourceful
scientists” have beaten the Nazis in the race to create a
nuclear weapon (160). Before the Nazis can properly prepare with
their own nuclear response, the President declares that American
“stratospheric bombers” armed with atomic bombs are
“heading for every great city in Germany” (161).

With the Axis powers now totally at the mercy of the United
States, the President “presents the American proposal for
peace and atomic disarmament” (161). According to H. Bruce
Franklin, the American proposal’s “terms will later
prove to be identical with those of the only proposal for nuclear
disarmament ever offered by the United States, the Baruch Plan of
1946” (161). Franklin provides the commonalities shared by
the Baruch Plan and its literary twin:

…a body dominated by American scientists would control
both the world’s supply of uranium and the licensing of
nuclear energy facilities to other nations; the United States would
maintain its monopoly on nuclear weaponry until some unspecified
date in the future when it would be turned over to an international
agency. (161)

In the story, the proposal is a complete success. Germany
surrenders and the Japanese and the Soviet Union follow suit a day
later (161). One demonstration of the superweapon is conducted, but
America limits this demonstration strictly to “the deserted
Russian steppes” (161). The story ends with unbridled
optimism because, according to Franklin, the “American atomic
bomb has brought the blessed Pax Americana to the planet”
(161).

Fact and fiction, however, did not harmonize when the Baruch
Plan was proposed at the first meeting of the United Nations Atomic
Energy Commission (UNAEC) in June 0f 1946. The plan was contingent
on Soviet-American cooperation, but the Russians had several
misgivings with the plan that made them uncooperative (“The
Acheson-Lilienthal and Baruch Plans, 1946”). The plan would
have established an Atomic Development Authority that “would
oversee the development and use of atomic energy, manage any
nuclear weapons, and inspect any nuclear facility conducting
research for peaceful purposes” (ibid). The proposal stated
that the United States would “begin the process of destroying
its nuclear arsenal” after “the plan was fully
implemented” (ibid). The Soviets, however, rejected this
aspect of the plan on the grounds that there was no guarantee that
America would submit to the Atomic Development Authority if it
retained its nuclear monopoly (ibid). The Soviets were also
extremely reluctant to allow international inspectors prying around
their domestic nuclear facilities (ibid). Finally, the Soviets
extremely disliked a feature of the proposal that would have
stripped the United Nations Security Council members of their veto
power so no member could resist U.N. sanctions imposed on nations
that violated regulations (ibid). For the Soviets, such a move was
considered suicide because the Security Council majority favored
the United States (ibid). The dreams of the atomic age ushering in
world government were temporarily dashed as the Cold War began.
While there were high hopes for the Baruch Plan, many within the
global oligarchical establishment seemed to be anticipating its
ultimate failure and began constructing the Cold War dialectic.

Ultimately, a sectarian struggle within the cult of the
superweapon may have been responsible for the Baruch Plan’s
demise. While Franklin contends that U.S. imperialism was a major
feature of the cult, evidence suggests that the cult began to
manifest itself in two distinct forms nearing the end of World War
II. The first manifestation, the Pax Americana sect, desired a
model of world government that would merely act as a vehicle for
the institutionalization of American global supremacy. The second
manifestation, the Pax Universalis sect, believed in a
merger between the United States and the Soviet Union with both
subordinated to a greater global entity.

It appears that proponents of the Pax Universalis sect
began passing atomic secrets to Stalin, hoping that such a move
would make the Soviet dictator receptive to the Baruch Plan’s
proposed Atomic Development Authority. Major George Racy Jordan was
a witness to this treason. Jordan "was the officer in charge of the
transfer of the Lend Lease supplies through the Great Falls,
Montana, air base" (Epperson 330). The transferable goods brought
to this base were finding their way to Russia (330). Researcher
Ralph Epperson gives us Jordan's story:

Major Jordan, curious by nature, opened various briefcases and
cartons, and saw various words he was not familiar with on various
papers: uranium, cyclotron, proton, neutron, cobalt, and plutonium.
In addition, Jordan discovered various reports from "Oak Ridge,
Manhattan District" (it was the "Manhattan Project" in Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, where the American scientists were developing the plans
for the atomic bomb) containing phrases like "energy produced by
fission." Jordan also discovered "… at least three
consignments of uranium chemicals… nearly three quarters of
a ton. Confirmed also was the shipment of one kilogram, or 2.2
pounds, of uranium metal at a time when the total American stock
was 4.5 pounds."

These findings meant little to Major Jordan until 1949, when Russia
exploded their first atomic bomb. It was then that he realized that
he had been witness to the transfer of the materials and plans for
construction of Russia's atomic bomb. And this occurred in 1943.
(330)

Major Jordan's discovery may point to more than just Soviet
subversion. Adherents of the Pax Universalis vision
probably believed that if both sides possessed nuclear weapons,
then an international regulatory agency would be accepted to
prevent an arms race. If this was, in fact, the motivation behind
such treason, then it came from foolish minds that were placing the
world and human survival at risk.

Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan
Project, was an important and significant disciple of the Pax
Universalis sect. There is strong evidence that Oppenheimer
was one of those responsible for passing nuclear secrets to the
Soviet Union. This contention, long considered to be a product of
the Red Scare, was supported by the testimony of Pavel Sudoplatov,
a member of the Soviet Union’s intelligence services.
Sudoplatov had been head of Department S, a joint GRU-NKVD project
to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding the nuclear bomb.
Sudoplatov’s 1994 autobiography, entitled Special
Tasks, covers this period of time in detail and covers
Sudoplatov’s recruitment of Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi,
Szilard, and Klaus Fuchs, all major minds behind the Manhattan
Project (Breindel). Sudoplatov claimed that Fuchs met with Soviet
couriers while the other three scientists “deliberately left
important information in places where it could be discovered by
agents Sudoplatov had insinuated into the laboratories”
(ibid). Fuchs would later confess and serve time in a British
prison for his crime while the other three were able to avoid
discovery (ibid).

While Oppenheimer was able to avoid discovery, however, he was
not able to avoid suspicion. Both the FBI and military intelligence
expressed concern about Oppenheimer during the war and the
scientist would be stripped of his security clearance several years
after the war concluded (ibid).

Critics of Sudoplatov have claimed that his autobiography was
the product of an old man who was relying on a poor memory to
reconstruct events that occurred years ago. The same critics also
are quick to point out that the available Soviet archives do not
contain documentation supporting Sudoplatov's claims concerning
Oppenheimer (ibid). While these criticisms are legitimate, Eric
Breindel is quick to point out that oral history “is an
altogether legitimate form” and that Sudoplatov's version of
the events in question may still be verified by files that have yet
to be declassified and released for public consumption (ibid).
Furthermore, it appears that members of the Soviet elite actually
believed Sudoplatov's claims. Shortly after Stalin's death,
Sudoplatov found himself on the wrong side of history when he
became the target of a purge conducted by Nikita Khrushchev (ibid).
After spending years in numerous prisons, Sudoplatov made an appeal
for rehabilitation in 1982 (ibid). The appeal, which was directed
to then-KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, included Sudoplatov's
collection of nuclear secrets from Oppenheimer as one of his
“achievements” (ibid). Breindel points out that the
appeal “was not intended for Western consumption” and
that neither Andropov or Sudoplatov could have known that the
appeal was going to be publicized 12 years later (ibid). Breindel
also states: “It doesn't seem likely that someone seeking
rehabilitation would make utterly false claims to the head of the
KGB; Andropov was in a position to verify Sudoplatov's
'achievements'” (ibid).

Sudoplatov's claims are also supported by Oppenheimer's
friendship with University of California, Berkely Professor Haakon
Chevalier. On July 23, 1964, Chevalier informed Oppenheimer that he
was preparing his memoirs for publication and that the manuscript
would reveal that both men had been members of a secret underground
unit of the Communist Party's professional section from 1938 to
1942 (“Chevalier to Oppenheimer, July 23, 1963”).
According to historian Gregg Herken, Barbara Chevalier, Haakon's
widow, allowed him “to read a journal and memoir she had
begun writing in the 1980s” (“The Oppenheimer Case: An
Exchange”). In the manuscript, Barbara revealed that Haakon
“had approached Oppenheimer to spy for the Soviet Union
during the war” (ibid). Barbara also wrote: “Oppie's
membership in a closed unit was very secret indeed” (ibid).
In the very least, this evidence suggests that Oppenheimer was
either a communist or a fellow traveler who might have been willing
to pass nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union if he were asked.

While Oppenheimer was, in all likelihood, an ideological
communist, he might have passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union
to serve a cause that ran deeper than the Stalinist agenda.
Oppenheimer may have hoped that by internationalizing the bomb, he
was increasing the probability that the Soviet Union would submit
to an international regulatory agency in order to avoid an arms
race. Oppenheimer was the chief scientific consultant to the
Acheson-Lilienthal special advisory committee that called for the
creation of the Atomic Development Authority (“The
Acheson-Lilienthal and Baruch Plans, 1946”). Oppenheimer
hoped that the Atomic Development Authority would provide a major
stepping stone to world government. He expressed this contention in
a May 16, 1946 lecture on “Atomic Explosives” before
the George Westinghouse Centennial Forum in Pittsburgh. During the
lecture, Oppenheimer stated:

What relation does the proposal of an International Atomic
Development Authority, entrusted with a far-reaching monopoly of
atomic energy --what relation does this proposal of ours have to do
with these questions? It proposes that in the field of atomic
energy there be set up a world government, that in this field there
be a renunciation of national sovereignty, that in this field there
be no legal veto power, that in this field there be international
law. How is this possible, in a world of sovereign nations? There
are only two ways in which this ever can be possible: one is
conquest, that destroys national sovereignty; and the other is the
partial renunciation of that sovereignty. What is here proposed is
such a partial renunciation, sufficient, but not more than
sufficient for an Atomic Development Authority to come into being,
to exercise its functions of development, exploitation and control,
to enable it to live and grow and to protect the world against the
use of atomic weapons and provide it with the benefits of atomic
energy. (Pais and Crease 153)

For Oppenheimer, the field of atomic energy and the proposed
Atomic Development Authority were supposed to contribute to the
death of the nation-state system. Oppenheimer may have assisted
with the acceleration of the Soviet Union's nuclear program in
order to realize this goal. If so, it was a major miscalculation,
because Oppenheimer did not anticipate the nationalist trajectory
Stalin would take with the close of the war.

The Cold War dialectic proved to be no less advantageous to the
cult of the superweapon. It created a climate of fear where nuclear
hysteria thrived. That hysteria was cinematically expressed through
the 1983 film The Day After, a movie that many consider to
be the ultimate nuclear fantasy. Dana Hull vividly recounts the
profound public reaction the film:

The movie generated enormous controversy in 1983. No network had
ever attempted to bring the horror of nuclear war to America's
living rooms, much less during sweeps week. Critics warned that it
was relentlessly depressing and deeply disturbing -- two punishing
prime-time hours of Hiroshima in the Heartland. The network warned
parents that impressionable young viewers should not see the movie,
which included graphic sequences of mass death and destruction.

I demanded to be allowed to watch it. Nuclear war and radiation
poisoning sounded very grown-up. I was ready to have a ringside
seat to Armageddon and all of its secrets. If we were going to be
blown up, I argued, I should be prepared. I even had a
holocaust-appropriate wardrobe: black sweaters and old Army
fatigues.

I don't remember actually sitting down to watch the Sunday night
special in our house. But I vividly remember certain scenes, images
that immediately seared into my psyche. When the nuclear missiles
hit, wind and flames engulfed the region. The rolling Kansas
prairie charred to black soot and became littered with the corpses
of cows and horses. An entire kindergarten class vaporized during a
bright orange blast of fire, instantly turning to skeletons. Green
and hairless people with boils on their faces staggered
Quasimodo-like along a desolate road in search of food. Jason
Robards cried in the rubble. As the credits rolled, a weak call for
help came from a basement bunker on a radio. "This is Lawrence,
Kan. Is anybody out there? Anybody at all?"

Nearly 100 million people watched the movie. We talked about it
in social studies class the next day, and some students delighted
in sharing their nightmares, or acting really freaked out.
The day after "The Day After" was high drama in junior high --
being traumatized was all the rage. (“Bring back the
bomb!”)

Indeed, The Day After was quite traumatizing. The bleak
epilogue of the film closes with the following admonition:

The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all
likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually
occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United
States.

It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire the
nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means
to avert this fateful day.

Juxtaposed with the series of traumatizing images that preceded
it, this admonition renders the apocalyptic narrative of The
Day After as inexorable. In fact, the closing statement of the
film characterizes WWIII as a “fateful day,” connoting
an eventuality that was supposedly foreordained within the context
of the nation-state system. Herein is the “illusion of an
infallibly accurate vision of how the world is going to look in the
future" that is a hallmark of all predictive programming.

Yet, unlike all previous nuclear anxiety fiction, The Day
After represented a shift in the artistic community away from
the Pax Americana vision of a unilateral world state to
the Pax Universalis vision of a multilateral world state.
Implicit in the appeal to “the nations of this earth, their
peoples and leaders” is the mandate for world political
unification, a normative contention held by the Pax
Universalis sect of the cult of the superweapon. In another
sequence of the film, a priest preaching to his congregation amid
the smoldering rubble invokes Revelation 11:18, thanking God for
smiting the “destroyers of the earth.” However, it must
be understood that this Biblical invocation is being made within
the broader gestalt of a non-Christian narrative. This prompts an
important question: Who are the “destroyers of the
earth” according to The Day After?

Of course, the various texts comprising human discourse are not
read in a cultural vacuum. On the level of consumption, "any one
text is necessarily read in relationship to others and . . . a
range of textual knowledges is brought to bear upon it" (Fiske
108). Likewise, the text of The Day After was and is
viewed in relationship to other texts. Given the fact that it
inhabits the same subgenre of nuclear anxiety fiction, Wells’
The World Set Free constitutes one of the texts that
is brought to bear upon The Day After. Implicit in the
priest’s sermon is a distorted Biblical condemnation of what
Wells called a “mere cult of warfare” in The
World Set Free. In The Shape of Things to Come,
Wells asserts that this cult is inextricably linked to the
nation-state system: "The existence of independent sovereign states
IS war, white or red, and only an elaborate mis-education blinded
the world to this elementary fact." Herein is the advocacy of the
same sort of multilateral world state envisioned by the Pax
Universalis sect of the cult of the superweapon. Multilateral
or unilateral models of global governance aside, political
unification as the only alternative to nuclear annihilation remains
a permanent fixture of nuclear anxiety fiction. Ever-present is a
discourse of fear.

As the sermon sequence opens, the audience hears a voice-over of
the priest reciting a portion of Revelation 8:7: “…and
the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt
up.” Simultaneously, the camera follows another character
wandering through rumble and dead farm animals. Implicit in this
sequence is the reconceptualization of the Biblical concept of the
Apocalypse as a purely immanent event. "Immanence" is a term
derived from the Latin phrase in manere, which means "to remain
within" ("Immanence," Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia).
An object of immanent experience remains within the ontological
confines of the physical universe. Likewise, the Apocalypse
depicted by The Day After completely indwells the material
cosmos, bereft of any supernatural or transcendent elements.

For instance, the locusts that emerge from the smoke upon the
earth in Revelation 9:3 are ripped from their Biblical matrix and
reconceptualized as the residual effects of radiation from the
bomb. Yet, there is an implicit rejection of Christian soteriology.
As the priest cites Revelation 9:4, where it is revealed that the
locusts will harm “only those men which have not the seal of
God in their foreheads,” one of the congregation topples over
from radiation sickness. The implication is that, as a purely
immanent event, the Apocalypse is an indiscriminate killer. There
is no salvation or deliverance forthcoming for believer and
unbeliever alike.

The Day After had a tremendous impact on the minds of
the viewing audience. The movie even converted then-President
Ronald Reagan to the Pax Universalis sect. In his
autobiography, Reagan stated that the movie had left him
“greatly depressed” and had convinced him that a
nuclear war was not winnable (585). According to The Day
After’s director, Nicholas Meyer, the film had played a
major role in the signing of the Intermediate Range Weapons (INF)
Agreement in 1986 (“Fallout from ‘The Day
After’”). Meyer claims that, shortly after Reagan
signed the Treaty at the Reykavik Summit, the administration sent
him a telegram stating: “Don’t think your movie
didn’t have any part of this, because it did”
(ibid).

While Meyer was proud of his movie’s influence on the
signing of the INF treaty, the fact was that Meyer had scared the
President into signing an agreement that placed America at risk.
The Oppenheimer case clearly illustrates the Pax
Universalis sect’s disregard of Russia’s long
history of deception and non-compliance, and the continuation of
that blindness can be seen in the case of The Day After.
In September 1991, U.S. intelligence agencies discovered that
Russia had violated the INF Treaty by secretly deploying
nuclear-tipped SS-23 missiles in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and
Bulgaria (Timmerman, “Russia’s hidden nuclear missiles:
Clinton turned blind eye to major treaty violations.”). The
Soviets deployed these secret batteries “just prior to
signing the Treaty, and never declared them or destroyed
them” (ibid). In the event of a war, these SS-23s would have
given the Soviets an unfair advantage. Investigative journalist
Kenneth Timmerman elaborates:

In the event of war in Europe between NATO and the Warsaw Pact,
they (the SS-23) would have given the Soviets a clear military
advantage by allowing them to launch a surprise nuclear strike at
the heart of NATO forces in Germany. (ibid)

It seems that Meyer did not explore Russia’s lack of
commitment to arms control before traumatizing Americans with
graphic scenes of a devastated heartland. As a result,
Meyer’s film partially induced America’s credulous
pursuit of peace at the Reykjavik Summit while the Soviets were
secretly preparing for war. Reckless abandon seems to be a mainstay
of the cult of the superweapon.

While Meyer’s vision of a purely immanent Apocalypse made
a definite impact on geopolitics, it merely reaffirmed many of the
postmillennial doctrines espoused by the darker elements within the
evangelical community. This is especially true for evangelicals
like Tim LaHaye, whose Left Behind novels portray a
nuclear holocaust as a precursor to the return of Jesus Christ.
LaHaye’s motives for promoting such a holocaust come into a
clearer focus when one examines his Dominionist theology.

Basically, Dominionism is a cult of neo-Gnostic jihadists
committed to goals that almost mirror the objectives of earlier
sociopolitical Utopians. Chris Hedges describes Dominionism as
follows:

What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism,
share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal
to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been
replaced by a call for Christian "dominion" over the nation and,
eventually, over the earth itself. Dominionists preach that Jesus
has called them to build the kingdom of God in the here and now,
whereas previously it was thought we would have to wait for it.
America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and
all political and intellectual opponents of America's Christian
leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. ("Soldiers of
Christ")

There is a crucial distinction to be made between using the
Scriptures as a compass for making decisions within the political
system and using the Scriptures as a rationale for co-opting and
controlling the political system. In Vengeance is Ours: The
Church in Dominion, Albert Dager synopsizes the three basic
tenets upon which this militarized form of Christianity is
premised:

1) Satan usurped man's dominion over the earth through the
temptation of Adam and Eve; 2) The Church is God's instrument to
take dominion back from Satan; 3) Jesus cannot or will not return
until the Church has taken dominion by gaining control of the
earth's governmental and social institutions. (87)

Thus, Jesus' kingdom is reduced to a secular government
established by and maintained through secular power. While secular
progressives cite Dominionism as a violation of the separation of
church and state, it actually represents the subsumption of the
church under the state. Dominionism empowers temporal machinations.
Political, social, and military powers attain ascendancy under the
rubric of maintaining the Dominionist government. Ultimately, the
State is apotheosized. Again, this was an objective of earlier
sociopolitical Utopians. That this particular strain of Utopianism
has a marginally theistic gloss is inconsequential. Dominionism
represents but one more permutation of sociopolitical Utopianism.
This contention is reinforced by Dominionism's inherently
neo-Gnostic character.

The neo-Gnostic character of Dominionism is underscored by its
mandate for Dominionists to "build the kingdom of God in the here
and now." Such a mandate reconceptualizes the Eschaton (i.e., "end
of days") as an object of immanent experience. Thus, the
Dominionists' Eschaton purely indwells the material cosmos. This
reconceptualization was a hallmark of modern sociopolitical Utopian
movements, such as communism and fascism. These movements proffered
their own anthropocentric soteriology, which mandated the
establishment of an earthly paradise. For them, salvation was not
attained through a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, but through
the conscious re-sculpting of the material conditions of
existence.

Dominionist soteriology is no less anthropocentric. According to
Dominionist theology, Jesus is either unwilling or unable to return
to earth. If this is true, then Christ's role as Savior is
nullified. After all, the Scriptures state that Christ's return
will represent the final installment in humanity's salvation.
Hebrews 9:28 declares: "So Christ was once offered to bear the sins
of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the
second time without sin unto salvation" (emphasis added).
According to Dominionism, man, not God, shall make His Kingdom
come. Thus, the final installation of humanity's salvation is left
in the hands of man himself.

Driven by an overwhelming disdain for pistis (faith),
the new Gnostics of sociopolitical Utopianism have sought to draw
knowledge that was commonly associated with the transcendent "into
a firmer grip than the cognitio fidei, the cognition of
faith, will afford" (Voegelin 124). In opposition to
pistis, neo-Gnostics promote their own bowdlerized version
of gnosis, which represents a “secret knowledge of
how to master the blind forces of nature for a sociopolitical
purpose” (Martin 519-20). Likewise, the Dominionist either
consciously or unconsciously rejects Paul's admonition to "walk by
faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7). While Dominionists might
claim to have faith, their aspiration to build God's kingdom
themselves betrays their lack of faith in the Lord's ability to
fulfill His own will. In true anthropocentric fashion, the
Dominionist becomes the will of God in toto. The
Dominionist, not God, makes the kingdom come and the kingdom comes
through purely secular institutions and political machinations.

Dominionism eviscerates Christianity. It transplants all of the
transcendent objects of Christian faith within the ontological
plane of the physical universe. Thus, Christianity is reduced to
little more than a revolutionary ideology closely akin to communism
and other forms of sociopolitical Utopianism. Ironically, most of
the sociopolitical Utopian movements of history have been premised
upon the rejection of the traditional theistic conception of God
and the Gnostic doctrine of self-salvation. Although Dominionists
speak about God, salvation, and faith, their notion of such
concepts is couched in neo-Gnostic immanentism and sociopolitical
Utopianism. To paraphrase the apostle Paul, they have a form of
godliness, but deny its power (2 Timothy 3:5).

This anthropocentric soteriology reinforces the Dominionist
mandate to make “Thy kingdom come.” As is frighteningly
evidenced by the images of nuclear holocaust conjured by
LaHaye’s Left Behind series, some Dominionists
consider nuclear war an effective means of immanentizing the
Eschaton. LaHaye almost imbues the atomic bomb with a
quasi-divinity, depicting it as providentially ordained device for
facilitating the return of Christ. In this sense, some Dominionist
enclaves could qualify as marginally theistic incarnations of the
cult of the superweapon. Given their close alignment with
neoconservatives, Dominionist proponents of nuclear warfare
gravitate towards the Pax Americana sect of the cult of
the superweapon.

Manhattan Project participant Edward Teller is a case in point.
Teller was a devotee of the Pax Americana manifestation of
the cult of the superweapon, calling for the build up and
development of nuclear weapons (“The Council for National
Policy: Selected Member Biographies”). Yet, Teller was also a
participant in a little-known, but extremely powerful cabal that
counts some of the leading proponents of Dominionism as
participants. Teller served on the board of governors of the
Council for National Policy (CNP) in 1982 (ibid). The American
physicist and “father of the H-bomb” was also on the
advisory board of the Western Goals Foundation, the precursor to
the CNP (ibid). The CNP is a hotbed of Dominionists. Rev. R.J.
Rushdoony, Gary North, Marvin Olasky, the late D. James Kennedy,
and Howard Ahmanson Jr. are just some of the Dominionist thinkers
who are past or current participants in the CNP (ibid).

It’s not hard to understand why Teller would participate
in such a bizarre group. The CNP seems to be composed of
Dominionist devotees of the cult of the superweapon. CNP founder
Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series could be
considered a new form of the nuclear fantasy that blends mushroom
clouds with Dominionism’s bizarre neo-Gnostic interpretation
of the Book of Revelation. As John Cloud points out in Time
Magazine:

The nuclear frights of, say, Tom Clancy's The Sum of All
Fears wouldn't fill a chapter in the Left
Behind series. (Large chunks of several U.S. cities have
been bombed to smithereens by page 110 of Book 3.) (“Meet the
Prophets”)

LaHaye’s series also seems to be a Dominionist variety of
predictive programming. In his Time Magazine article,
journalist Cloud also states that “many people are starting
to read the Left Behind books not as novels but as
tomorrow's newspapers” (ibid). Does LaHaye want gullible
Christian readers to believe that a nuclear holocaust is an
inexorable part of God’s will? If that is LaHaye’s
intent, it has become an effective tool for recruiting unsuspecting
Christians into the Dominionist camp. After all, the only people
who are raptured in Left Behind are those who accept
LaHaye’s Dominionist gospel. Everyone else is left behind to
face nuclear annihilation. The bomb and God’s wrath merge to
form a horrifying immanent judgment.

While cults have proven to be effective as elite conduits, they
usually have very short life spans. Wells wanted to make a
permanent contribution to the oligarchs’ crusade for world
government, so he used science fiction to weave his cult into the
very fabric of culture itself. Groups such as the Illuminati, the
Knights Templar, the Jesuits, and others have all been effectively
suppressed by different nations at different times. Yet, how does a
national government effectively suppress a cultural phenomenon?
History has shown that attempts to do so, more often than not, are
met with failure.

Wells’ cult of the superweapon spread like wildfire,
mimicking Dostoevsky’s “fire in the minds of men”
perfectly. That fire spread to Wells’ fellow elitists,
engendering them with an undying devotion that mirrored the most
ardent religious fanatic. Given the amount of institutional cover
A.Q. Khan received, it is very likely that his network as a product
of the cult of the superweapon. Perhaps the world’s
bluebloods had felt that the psychological impact of the
“communist bomb” had diminished. Thus, it was time to
unleash upon humanity the menace of the “Islamic Bomb.”
If this is the case, Bhutto may have had no idea what she was up
against when she promised to expose Khan to the light of
scrutiny.

For the former Prime Minister, the move may have been an attempt
at repentance and restitution for her contribution to the plague of
proliferation. According to Shyam Bhatia, a London-based
investigative reporter, Bhutto provided North Korea with vital
information concerning uranium enrichment during a state visit in
1993 (Kessler). Bhatia claims that this information was revealed to
him by Bhutto during a conversation in 2003 (ibid). Bhutto told
Bhatia that she acted as “a two-way courier,” bartering
uranium enrichment data in return for missile from Pyongyang
(ibid). At the time, Bhutto believed that she was helping her
country, which was “in desperate need of new missile
technology that would counter improvements in India's
missiles” (ibid). Years later, Bhutto may have realized that
she had, in fact, made a mistake. Making things right, however,
would call for Bhutto confronting a cultural phenomenon that could
claim powerful members of the global oligarchical establishments as
its initiates. Perhaps the cult of the superweapon even mutated,
becoming a cult of assassination, when the elite realized that
Bhutto had become a threat. As this essay has demonstrated, such
morally repugnant acts are not beyond consideration for the cult of
the superweapon. Assassination would be mere child’s play for
those who blackmailed the world with the bomb.

Franklin, H. Bruce. “Eternally safe for democracy: the
final solution of American science fiction.” Science
Fiction, Social Conflict, and War. Philip John Davies, ed.,
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990, 151-68.

About the Authors

Phillip D. Collins acted as the editor for The
Hidden Face of Terrorism. He co-authored the book The
Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship, which is available at
www.amazon.com. It is also available as an E-book at
www.4acloserlook.com. Phillip has also written articles for
Paranoia Magazine, MKzine, News With Views,
B.I.P.E.D.: The Official Website of Darwinian Dissent and
Conspiracy Archive. He has also been interviewed on several
radio programs, including A Closer Look, Peering Into
Darkness, From the Grassy Knoll, Frankly
Speaking, the ByteShow, and Sphinx Radio.

In 1999, Phillip earned an Associate degree of Arts and Science. In
2006, he earned a bachelor's degree with a major in communication
studies and liberal studies along with a minor in philosophy. During
the course of his seven-year college career, Phillip has studied
philosophy, religion, political science, semiotics, journalism,
theatre, and classic literature. He recently completed a collection of
short stories, poetry, and prose entitled Expansive
Thoughts. Readers can learn more about it at www.expansivethoughts.com.

Paul D. Collins has studied suppressed history and the
shadowy undercurrents of world political dynamics for roughly eleven
years. In 1999, he earned his Associate of Arts and Science degree. In
2006, he completed his bachelor's degree with a major in liberal
studies and a minor political science. Paul has authored another book
entitled The Hidden Face of Terrorism: The Dark Side of Social
Engineering, From Antiquity to September 11. Published in
November 2002, the book is available online from www.1stbooks.com, barnesandnoble.com,
and also amazon.com. It
can be purchased as an e-book (ISBN 1-4033-6798-1) or in paperback
format (ISBN 1-4033-6799-X). Paul also co-authored The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship.